The Write Niche – Focusing Your Freelance Writing Gig

In the realm of content writing, the challenge isn’t finding work but finding work that actually helps pay the bills. Freelance writing is an attractive industry, which is why the competition has continually risen while the rate of pay has dwindled. If a supplemental income is all someone seeks, then it’s not too difficult to establish that through freelance writing. But for those who want to carve out a more reliable income stream, niching content writing is the way to go. Here are some tips to bolster your freelance writing career and boost your independent income.

The Advantage

You might wonder why one would want to narrow down their business instead of opening their doors to potentially every type of client. It’s simple. Focusing content writing on one or more specialty areas offers two important advantages:

Clients who want niched writing will seek and trust a writer who is specialized in that niche over someone who offers general writing services.

You can charge more for niched writing because clients who want this are willing to pay extra for quality work that is specific to their needs.

You can easily gather a stream of freelance writing work without niching yourself, but with so many freelance writers out there these jobs generally don’t pay much and can quickly devour your precious time. And since freelance writing really boils down to the amount of work you can get done in a given day, getting higher pay per gig is crucial as there are only so many hours in a day.

This is the reason niching your content writing work is important. So much so, that I devote an entire chapter to the subject in my new book Content to Cash. If this is an area that interests you, I highly recommend checking the book out for many strategies to harness the power of niching freelance writing work.

The great part is, creating a niche or two… or three… doesn’t mean you’re limiting yourself either. In fact, it’s quite the opposite! When you focus your efforts and writing time on only a few or even one type of writing, you only get faster and better at what you do. When creating writing niches, consider the following points.

What You Know

This is the best place to start when niching your content writing career. What are you already knowledgeable about? Dig deep. You don’t need to be proficient in legal speak or possess and MBA to effectively niche yourself. If you have a passion for clothes, there are independent clothing lines that need writing. If you worked in a brewery years ago, you’ve got a head-start on writing in this area. Much stranger topics have landed people lucrative jobs. Canvas your experiences and you’ll find some genre you can leverage.

What You Love

There is no substitute for passion. If something gets you excited, you can traverse any distance and conquer any obstacle. Pair a subject you are deeply interested in with your writing skills, and presto you’ve got a niche that will serve you well. Of course, our interests don’t always align with freelance work that’s in demand, but with a little imagination it’s possible to carve out a creative compromise. Research common content writing topics and see if any of them can be tweaked in a direction that gets your blood pumping and your workload growing.